


Forging? That what you’re calling it?

by kate_the_reader



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: 528491, Gen, Pre-Relationship, Role Reversal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 09:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kate_the_reader/pseuds/kate_the_reader
Summary: It's dreamshare, but not as you know it. What if Arthur is the forger and Eames the pointman?





	Forging? That what you’re calling it?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queuebird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queuebird/gifts).

> This is an Inception bingo prize for queuebird (shamefully delayed). They prompted: Arthur is the forger and Eames is the pointman.
> 
> And I thought: I've always wanted to write what some of us came up with one day, a 528491 fic. The rules we invented were: it has to be a two-part fic, first half to be 528 words long, and must start with the name of character A and end with the name of character B. The second part is to be 491 words long, and start with the name of character B and end on character A. So here is my 528491 fic.  
I hope it's fun, queuebird.

Arthur opens the email even though the sender — eamesthepoint@dreams.com — is unfamiliar.

“Arthur,” it starts, “(may I call you Arthur?)

Sebastian Jones suggested I get hold of you, because of your unique skillset. Bit of a tricky job, and we may need to do more than a simple extraction.

Interested?

Eames.”

He types: “Maybe, but I need a few more details. Arthur (yes you may)” and hits send.

He puts out a few feelers and is intrigued by what he hears: British, posh, possibly ex-MI6, maybe SAS. “You’ll see,” more than one person tells him, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Eames’ next email fills in enough detail for Arthur to accept the gig, because it’s obvious they do need his ability to make a mark think he’s someone else. It’s not easy, but it makes some jobs easier. He drew on high school theater, the drama society at college. He’d been a good actor, even wondered if he should pursue it professionally, but his parents had been adamant about a proper job, so he’d studied business. They thought he was an international consultant. They didn’t need to know he’d been recruited by a shady architecture professor, that semester in Paris.

The job’s in Tokyo. The flight is long, and when he lands, he just wants to get to the hotel. He looks around for whoever has come to pick him up, expecting a driver holding a sign, and sees no one. Only after the area clears does he see him leaning against the wall — light brown hair, neatly styled, coral shirt under a moss-green blazer. He’s got one foot crossed over the other ankle. He looks like someone in a Graham Greene novel.

“Arthur?” he says, walking over. “Eames.” He is British, posh, and has a body under those clothes that says power he knows how to use. He leads the way to a sports car illegally parked at the cab stand, winks at the gesticulating cop and drives too fast into the city.

“How did you get away with that?” asks Arthur, as they pull up to a hotel.

“Expat charm, darling,” Eames says, holding the car door for Arthur. “Impressed, are you?”

Arthur just raises an eyebrow, and Eames laughs.

Eames has his team working out of a suite. It’s a bit chaotic, clothes draped over sofas, too many used coffee cups littering the tables. Arthur thinks he would arrange things differently.

The job is, as Eames promised, a bit tricky. Arthur’s skill throws the mark off a little, at first, but it’s clear he sees through it enough to be suspicious and they only just escape his riled-up projections with the information they need.

“Fuck!” Arthur’s too rattled to remain calm after they’ve left the mark in the hotel room. “If I’d known you needed a female decoy, I’d have told you to hire one and leave me out of it.”

“I didn’t know that!” Eames retorts. He’s sweating, his expat charm slipping badly.

“Yeah, your research wasn’t good enough, was it?” Arthur snarls. “I bet I could have found that out, if I’d been managing the gig. Don’t call on me again, Eames!”

*

Eames could kick himself, hiring Arthur based on his reputation alone, without probing deeply enough into his purported skill. But there’d been so many balls to keep up in the air and truthfully, detail just wasn’t his strong suit. He’d been so busy trying to keep them all co-operating (note to self: one shared hotel suite was asking for trouble) that he'd let the research slide a bit.

Damn shame that Arthur will probably never work with him again. When he hadn’t been shooting Eames down in flames, he’d been interesting. And gorgeous. If only he’d been better at getting into character. Although Eames has to admit, they hadn’t actually known they would need a female decoy and that was definitely on him.

At a loose end, since no one is hiring him after the Tokyo Debacle (as it has become known), he has plenty of time on his hands to research Arthur’s apparently not so unique skillset and get way better at it. It takes bloody hours in front of mirrors in dreams, but finally he can slip into character as not just a man who looks a bit like him, but as a woman, even a tiny woman, a blonde woman, or a redheaded woman.

Then all he needs is a job to try it out on, but with his reputation shot to hell, it is a while before he finds a gig. It takes calling in several favors before Dominic Cobb is persuaded by his far nicer wife to give Eames a shot.

“Forging? That what you’re calling it?”

“I can do the other kind too, if you like,” Eames tells him tartly. “Versatile, I am.”

Cobb is secretive about the other team members, but Eames is desperate, so he doesn’t insist.

When he walks into the job HQ (an abandoned office far from the hotel) he doesn’t immediately recognize the slim dark-haired guy dragging sun loungers around. It is only when he turns around— “What the fuck are you doing here, Eames?” — that he realizes it is Arthur.

“I could ask the same, darling,” he says, laying on the sarcastic charm to cover his confusion.

“Running a job smoothly. Doing my research.”

“No more decoy work then?”

“God no.” Arthur laughs. “My business degree qualified me for management, more than a few college roles did for acting. Or what do you call it? Forging.”

“Well, we’ll see if it actually works, I suppose.”

The job runs smoothly — detail is Arthur’s strong suit, clearly. Eames is confident he can be the woman they need, but he wants to practice.

“Come under with me so I can try the forge?” he asks Arthur after the others have left one day.

“Alright, let’s see what you can do.”

So they go under and Eames sits in front of a mirror and calls up the redheaded woman.

Arthur’s eyes widen when he walks round a corner. “Where’s Eames?”

“Right here, Arthur.”


End file.
